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Vidya Balan on career women, love, sex, losing virginity and UNHOOKED

October 3, 2012 11:24:38 AM ISTBy Anaam, Glamsham Editorial

'People almost look down upon you if you are a virgin after a certain age, which is upsetting. What's the hurry? There's a lifetime to have sex and if you can wait and have it with someone you really like you'd enjoy it so much more.' - Vidya Balan

VIDYA BALAN

It's the novel UNHOOKED by Munmun Ghosh that led her to speak her mind out on a subject that is so close to the heart and mind of career women in urban India today. She loved the novel and identified with it, having watched people around her, the girls in the media, and the metros, going through similar experiences as the book's protagonist.

She says, "There's so much pressure today on girls to have boyfriends. People look at you as if you are diseased if you don't have one. And you are made to feel depressed on special days. I have gone through it too. There are no brownie points for knowing your mind and waiting for what you believe you deserve, waiting for your dreams, both personal and professional, to be realized.

She thinks the pressure to be a couple, to change one's single status pushes so many people into wrong relationships. And that's the reason so many relationships are breaking today.

She adds, "I was single for a long time and was asked about it. I would say I enjoy being single. Also, maybe because I led a full professional life, I didn't feel the pressure much. I have lots of single friends. One of my friends got married at 43 and lost her virginity, that's how she chose it and while reading UNHOOKED, I felt as if I were reading her story. Also, if you want to have a romp every weekend, that too is fine. One must be free to choose."

Vidya Balan will now be the star attraction at the launch and reading of UNHOOKED at Landmark Bookstore, Infiniti Mall, Versova, Andheri (W), Mumbai, on 5th October 2012 (Friday), at 6.30 PM. The one-hour event will see her reading excerpts from the book and talking to the media and the public about its subject.

UNHOOKED is the second novel by Munmun Ghosh, who worked as a full-fledged journalist with different publications before turning to creative writing. HUSHED VOICES, her first novel that was published in 2005, delved into the lives of the marginalized classes of Mumbai. In UNHOOKED, she explores the metro phenomenon of intellectual mating between the sexes and its repercussions. The novel's protagonist woos the men she fancies with words alone, determined to lose her virginity to that man alone who commits. Noted writer and journalist Shobhaa De has commended the book as 'an unblinking view of the contemporary concerns that confront thirty-something career women looking for love, but not necessarily sex."